Smart Internet Lab at 10. Pioneering 5G, shaping 6G, and training tomorrow’s network innovators

When the Smart Internet Lab was founded a decade ago, the UK’s telecoms and digital infrastructure landscape looked very different. Research communities were active, but fragmented. Optical engineers were pushing the limits of fibre; wireless teams were exploring early 5G concepts; cloud researchers were rethinking distributed compute. But few were looking at how these pieces connected.

Professor Dimitra Simeonidou, who created the Lab in 2015, saw a gap – a need for an integrated approach to future networks, and set about creating an environment that would make this happen.

“Optical, wireless, cloud, and application communities were each making huge advances, but almost no one was looking at the whole system end-to-end,” she says. “Networks were getting more complex, more software-defined, and more critical to society, yet our research and infrastructure were still organised in silos.”

The ambition was to rethink the internet as a programmable, human-centric infrastructure, rather than a set of separate technologies. And 10 years on, that vision has shaped everything from 5G experimentation to 6G research, and positioned Bristol as one of the UK’s most important centres for next-generation network innovation.

For Simeonidou, it was important to have a set of principles that could shape the Lab’s identity, especially in its first few years.

“We decided we would always work end-to-end: from fibre and radio hardware through network control and orchestration, up to applications and user experience,” says Simeonidou. “That’s why we invested so heavily in integrated testbeds rather than isolated labs.”

The second decision was to commit the lab to being “city-embedded,” she adds. “Through projects like Bristol is Open and our 5GUK test networks, we treated Bristol itself as a living laboratory, a programmable city where we could experiment on real streets, venues, and transport systems, not just in simulation.”

The third principle was to put collaboration at the core, and make the Lab open to industry, local government, communities, and other universities.

“That openness – technical and organisational – became part of the Lab’s DNA and shaped everything from our governance to how we trained students,” she says.

Measuring impact

A decade on, those principles created the foundation for collaboration and accelerating innovation. There have been several moments that captured the Lab’s growing influence on the UK’s approach to advanced networks. Simeonidou points first to Bristol’s early 5G urban showcases, including public demonstrations and cultural pilots, which helped shift 5G from theory to visible, public experience.

“The Bristol 5G showcases put the city on the map as one of the first places in Europe where you could experience 5G, not just read about it in a white paper,” she says.

Then there is the 5GUK Test Network, linking Bristol and Bath, which became a reference model for how to build and operate flexible, software-defined testbeds at national scale.

“It showed that the UK could run multi-technology, multi-vendor experimental infrastructure in a way that was both rigorous and open,” says Simeonidou.

The Lab also staged the world’s first 5G music lesson, a low-latency performance between Bristol, Birmingham, and London featuring Jamie Cullum, demonstrating in real time how ultra-responsive networks could support entirely new cultural and educational experiences.

More recently, the Lab’s leadership in major UK and EU 6G-enabling programmes, and the EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council) investment in future communication systems, cement its status as a strategic national asset.

But much of the Lab’s contribution is less visible. Its work has influenced UK government thinking through the 5G Testbeds and Trials Programme and, more recently, UKTIN, where Simeonidou helps shape national capability around research, diversification, and long-term telecoms resilience. Researchers from the Lab also contribute to ITU and ETSI, particularly around disaggregated architectures and early 6G concepts.

Beyond standards and strategy, the Lab has also played a long game on skills.

“We’ve trained a generation of engineers, researchers, and entrepreneurs,” Simeonidou says. Many of them have stayed in the Bristol-Bath region, supporting operators, vendors, public-sector bodies, and a growing number of deep tech and digital infrastructure start-ups. The effect is cumulative, creating a cluster that now feeds back into the city’s logistics, mobility, creative, and advanced manufacturing sectors.

Much of the Lab’s success is in fact tied to the city. Bristol already had the digital foundations (dark fibre, advanced compute, an emerging smart-city agenda) but equally important was the city’s culture of applied experimentation.

“Bristol is big enough to be complex, but small enough to be collaborative,” says Simeonidou.

The city’s mix of media, creative technology, robotics, and environmental innovation meant the Lab could test not just the performance of networks, but their use in public settings and real-world services. Trials weren’t confined to labs or controlled environments; they involved venues, transport systems, festivals, and community organisations. That ability to test technical and social impact simultaneously remains one of the region’s biggest advantages.

10 years later

A decade of testing networks in the real world has left a clear mark. Technologies and approaches that once sat on the fringes of academic projects in Bristol have since become mainstream priorities for operators, vendors, and standards bodies. In many ways, the wider industry has moved towards the architecture the Lab was already building.

This is most obvious in three areas that have shifted from early-stage experimentation to sector-wide direction. Each reflects a bet the Lab made long before it became orthodoxy and each now underpins how next-generation networks are being designed.

“One is the move to fully programmable, software-defined, disaggregated networks – across optical transport, RAN, core, and now quantum,” says Simeonidou. “That is precisely the world we built our lab and testbeds for, a world where you can slice, orchestrate, and reconfigure end-to-end paths in software and hardware.”

Another is the rise of edge computing and multi-access edge cloud, she says, “which aligned with our insistence on combining networks and cloud rather than treating them separately.”

Finally, the emerging 6G narrative. “Human-centric, integrating sensing, AI, and digital twins. It mirrors the “future networks 2030” vision we articulated several years ago.”

And it’s not just the UK taking note. Ideas first tested in Bristol now appear in international standards discussions and collaborative EU projects. Several countries have since adopted experimental models inspired by Bristol’s open, city-scale approach.

The next 10 years: intelligence, convergence, and quantum

Looking ahead, Simeonidou sees a decisive shift towards networks that are defined by intent and intelligence rather than raw connectivity.

“At the infrastructure level, we’re going to see tighter convergence of optical, radio and compute,” she says. That includes all-spectrum connectivity supported by green optical backbones, dense edge-cloud architectures, and AI-native control planes capable of real-time optimisation and near zero-touch operation.

Quantum-safe and quantum-enhanced communication will also move from research pilots to real deployment, particularly in sectors where long-term security is essential. Hybrid classical-quantum architectures, she argues, will become standard rather than experimental.

Meanwhile, the applications layer will evolve quickly. Networks will serve as substrates for sensing, digital twins, low-latency media, and immersive environments that blend physical and digital domains. This is an area where the UK, and Bristol in particular, already has a head start.

So, what capabilities or skills does the UK most urgently need to build now to remain competitive through the 2030s?

“We need systems thinkers who can span optics, radio, cloud, and AI, and understand security and regulation as first-class concerns, not afterthoughts,” says Simeonidou. “On the technical side, that means deep skills in photonics and high-speed electronics, RF and advanced antenna systems, software-defined networking and cloud-native engineering, data science and machine learning, and increasingly quantum communications.”

Equally important are NetDevOps skills, she adds – people who can treat the network as code, automate complex deployments, and work with open-source communities.

“And we shouldn’t underestimate the value of people who can bridge engineering with social science, policy, ethics, and business model design. The UK’s competitiveness will depend on being able to deploy advanced networks that are trusted, inclusive, and economically sustainable, not just technically impressive.”

It’s a good message and encompasses the whole ethos of the Lab, one which will continue to set a benchmark for connectivity innovation.

“I’d like people to say that the Smart Internet Lab helped the UK to skip a generation in how it thought about connectivity,” says Simeonidou, reflecting on the Lab’s future legacy. She adds that this should be about people as much as technology. A global community of alumni leading innovation in industry, academia, and government, and a city that continues to serve as a living laboratory for responsible digital futures.

“If, by 2040,” says Simeonidou, “Bristol is still seen as a place where you can build the future network and see its impact on real lives, then the Lab will have done its job.”